Warren Morgan – To Go or Stay?

Published in the Argus 27.10.2017.

The late Tony Benn M.P. divided people into weathervanes and signposts. Signposts are guides, showing the way, firm under pressure. Weathervanes shift direction in response to prevailing winds.

Brighton & Hove Labour Party members should remember this as they consider re-election and potential de-selection of councillors. Warren Morgan and some other politicians do seem at odds with the current direction of their Party.

However, if Corbyn’s people pursue de-selections, they need to be sure that the politicians they get, will be better than the politicians they had. An atmosphere of cult-like adoration currently surrounds Jeremy Corbyn, as it once did Tony Blair. With most of the mainstream, pro-remain media in full cry after Theresa May, Corbyn is getting a remarkably easy ride. To many, he looks a shoo-in for the next General Election. As a result, every careerist and attention seeker from Oxbridge to Wapping, and Sheffield to Kemptown now tacks Left, just as they or their kind once tacked Right. Once selected, and when the political climate changes, as it will, they’ll shift direction as it suits them.

In the 1990s, Blairite apparatchiks wore suits, carried pagers, defended global capitalism, courted “the filthy rich” insulted women and sneered at working class people. Nowadays, Corbynistas dress casually, argue for nationalisation and “the many not the few” while singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”. And still, it seems, insult women and sneer at working class people.

I do not agree with Warren Morgan, but he is, I suspect, a signpost rather than a weathervane. A political bruiser and front-stabber, at least people know where they are with him.

The Crisis in Social Care – Family Members Take up the Slack

The MP Philip Lee, a former GP, has accused families of being “too selfish” to care for elderly relatives. In response to reports of serious shortages of good quality residential homes, he told a fringe meeting of Age UK at the Conservative Conference that it is up to “families” to shoulder more of the burden, rather than taking up scarce places in care homes. He claimed we could learn from how the “Muslim and Hindu communities look after their elders”, echoing similar earlier statements from Jeremy Hunt the health secretary, and Jackie Doyle-Price, the Care Minister.

In reality, of course, it is not ‘families’ who bear the burden, it is individuals, usually women – many of whom have no choice. Traditional Muslim and Hindu families assume that the duty of care rests on daughters in law. In indigenous British families, it tends to be the daughter who takes responsibility. Whatever way you cut it, it is women who take the strain, they who are denied paid employment or forced to give it up so that children and then elderly parents can be protected and cared for.

Since the 2008 crash, women have born the burden of austerity. Their pay and benefits have been cut, while many traditional jobs have gone. Austerity has been especially hard on middle-aged women, the so-called WASPI women, born in the 1950s. They are losing thousands of pounds of state pension they were entitled to expect and also time they planned to spend with their families. All because Parliament, most of whose members have gold-plated pensions, decided to raise women’s state pension age quicker than it should and without warning.

This ‘sandwich generation’ of women, with no expectation of private pensions, typically work part-time for low wages, providing unpaid care for both grandchildren and older parents. Many such women abandoned earlier career opportunities to care for children and later gave up full time work to manage their parent’s care. In the face of a massive increase in Alzheimers-type disease, it is they who provide unpaid the bulk of what is estimated to be 11.6 billion pounds of unpaid dementia care each year. Small wonder that when the Conservative General Election Manifesto threatened to remove the ‘Triple Lock’ protecting levels of state pensions – something that would have disproportionately affected women – female voters abandoned Theresa May in droves and voted Labour. They had been pushed too far.

It is these people that Dr Lee had the gall to scold for “outsourcing” their parents’ care. A more sensitive man might have apologised for the failures of his own and previous governments. A more imaginative one might have proposed solutions. Instead, with breathtaking arrogance, Dr Lee told adult carers to accept that in future, care home places may not be available – and to consider providing care themselves. Given that most elderly people go into care homes only when they need high levels of personal care, that means shopping, cooking, feeding, lifting, bathing, administering medication, toileting or changing incontinence pads, not just occasionally, but regularly several times a day, every day.

The brutal truth is that elder-care is not something many men have to worry about. According to the Times journalist Alice Thomson men are “half as likely as women to care for elderly relatives.” There is no great societal expectation that they do so. Many care home staff tut disapprovingly at daughters who rush in to visit once or twice a week at the end of a working day, before dashing home to prepare supper – but look gently on a man who visits very occasionally at a weekend. He is accepted to be a loving son taking time out from legitimate employment. Daughters, on the other hand, already guilt-ridden and exhausted, are too often treated as if they have let their parent down.

At a personal level, few men have to worry about care in their own old age. The majority have – or expect to have – younger female partners to assume the burden of care while they live at home. Men without female partners have the advantage of higher social status than women, better pensions and greater disposable income. They are able to buy themselves protection in an ageist world – at least for a while. It is old women who tend to end up in care homes and – as every care home scandal reveals – where there is neglect, abuse or needless death in the care system, old women bear the brunt of it.

Each and every elderly person has a right to good quality housing, health and social care, whether or not he or she has a caring family. The public understand this and is prepared to pay for it.

It is the arrogance and indifference of politicians that is the problem.